MATT RIDLEY: The media and scientific establishments called me a conspiracy theorist for insisting Covid leaked from a lab. Why do they STILL have their heads in the sand?

Nature magazine, the house journal of the scientific profession, ran an article last week about four lessons that virologists could learn from the Covid pandemic.

These included ‘Viruses change more than expected’ and ‘Chronic cases could reveal insights’, but nowhere was there any reference to a lab leak.

This is like listing four lessons to be learned from the maiden voyage of the Titanic without mentioning the iceberg.

The truth is that much of the scientific community is still living in denial about the cause of a global pandemic that killed around 7million people worldwide, despite the evidence being voluminous, detailed, precise and devastating.

And you don’t have to take my word for it. The CIA, FBI, German intelligence and the former head of MI6 all say they think it started with a lab leak.

Outside China, the only people still with their heads in the sand, trying to pretend this debate is not even happening, are senior members of the scientific and media establishment.

The Royal Society has refused my requests that it organise a debate on the possible cause of the worst pandemic in a century, so has the Academy of Medical Sciences, of which I am a fellow.

Meanwhile, five scientific journals have now rejected papers summarising the evidence that I have co-written with Dr Alina Chan of Harvard and Professor Anton van der Merwe of Oxford. Initially, the journals justified their refusals by arguing that our position was a worthless conspiracy theory, now they say it’s old news.

The Covid pandemic almost certainly began with a leak from a laboratory, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, some time in the autumn of 2019.

The Wuhan Institute was planning exactly the right kind of experiment on exactly the right kind of bat virus at exactly the right time to create this virus – with exactly the wrong level of biosafety precautions.

It would be a bizarre coincidence if it happened naturally in that very spot at that very time, leaving no trace of its existence in any animal other than human beings.

Boris Johnson told me in 2021 that he was repeatedly pressed by his scientific advisers to sign off a declaration that it did not come from a lab – and refused.

One of those advisers, Patrick Vallance, is now a government minister in the House of Lords. He has never explained why, after joining a notorious phone call with Anthony Fauci, the then director of the US’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the Wellcome Trust’s Sir Jeremy Farrar on February 1, 2020, when the strong possibility of a lab leak was raised by several scientists, he chose to dismiss such suspicions.

That call resulted in a paper known as ‘Proximal Origin’, which was published five years ago this week, designed specifically to quash all further speculation about the lab leak.

But when Republican members of the US Congress obtained subpoenas for the Slack messages exchanged by the authors, it emerged that one of them, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, had written: ‘The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened.’

Why does it matter? Mainly because, unless we learn lessons, it could happen again. The longer some scientists refuse to debate it, the longer dangerous experiments continue.

Only last month, the journal Cell published the results of a risky experiment by Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute on a MERS-like virus, apparently without even asking whether it was done with appropriate biosafety.

The number of virology labs operating worldwide is mushrooming but the scientists involved are resisting attempts to increase regulation. While there are plenty of international rules about ethics in labs, there are almost none about safety.

Crucially, a lab leak could also explain why Covid was so hard to control. When viruses first infect human beings, they are usually not very infectious even if they are lethal – this was true of Ebola, MERS, SARS, Nipah, bird flu and others.

Each virus takes time to perfect the molecular keys with which to unlock our cells, time during which we can usually employ contact-tracing and quarantine to halt the outbreak.

Covid, by contrast, was highly infectious from the very start, as Alina Chan was the first to argue.

The fact that it spread faster than flu and made a mockery of all our efforts to contain it suggests it had been trained on human cells in the lab.

The Wuhan scientists had been collecting bat viruses for several years, swapping their genes, and infecting human cells with them, as well as ‘humanised mice’ that had been genetically modified to give them functioning human genes, cells, tissues and/or organs. One such experiment had increased the infectivity of a virus 10,000 times.

Paradoxically, there could be a glimmer of good news here – but only if we learn the right lesson.

Outbreaks that originate in food markets or as a result of ‘cave tourism’ that bring humans into contact with infected animals will cause local outbreaks that are easy to interrupt. So if we stop doing crazy experiments on dangerous viruses in city centres we could ensure fewer future pandemics.

The World Health Organisation used to worry about this. Its scientists went on record frequently in the late 2010s to express concern that the next pandemic could start in a lab.

Michael Ryan, director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, said in 2015 that ‘the last three clusters of SARS cases… that nearly started SARS again were two laboratory accidents in which lab workers infected themselves and nearly infected their own communities. So the accidental release of pathogens is probably much more significant’.

The EcoHealth Alliance, which funded work at the Wuhan institute and has now been disbarred from receiving federal cash by the US government, said in 2017: ‘The threat from lab-enhanced viruses is intensifying.’

Mystifyingly, the WHO has stopped saying that. You can search its website in vain for similar comments since the pandemic. Yet our Government is still using the existence of a WHO probe as an excuse for not even investigating the lab leak theory.

It told the Mail last week: ‘The UK continues to support the World Health Organisation in its ongoing expert study of the origins of Covid-19.’

It said the same thing to me in 2021 when I raised the matter in the House of Lords. Yet that WHO ‘study’ is being conducted by a dithering, dilatory and disgraceful committee called SAGO that has produced nothing useful in five years.

WHO’s only memorable contribution to the debate was a farcical press conference in 2021 in Wuhan, at which its team endorsed an absurd Chinese government theory that Covid reached China on frozen fish from abroad and rejected a lab leak as ‘extremely unlikely’.

When the pandemic began, WHO was embarrassingly sycophantic towards Xi Jinping and the Chinese government, praising ‘the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action’.

Dr Ryan said he had ‘never seen the scale, the commitment of an epidemic response at this level’. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general, said : ‘We always ask for political commitment, political leadership. That’s what we have seen.’

Yet, at the time, not only was the Chinese government covering up critical details about the outbreak, it was also concealing vital information about the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and refusing to share the institute’s database.

The shocking truth is that senior Western scientists are too afraid of China and too obsessed with protecting the reputation and funding of science at all costs to be trusted with investigating what happened.

Remember this virus killed roughly one thousand times as many people as the worst industrial accident of all time, the Bhopal chemical leak of 1984. It is time for Lord Vallance to show some courage.